The Progress of Frostbite

There haven't been any frontpage updates nor dev journal entries lately so I decided to write something to show that at least one of us is not playing Left 4 Dead 24/7.

I went through my map folder and found some old versions of Frostbite and thought it would be fun to show them to the community (and some new stuff of course).

When I first started making Frostbite I had absolutely no idea what it was going to be like gameplay-wise. The last map I made, Forgotten, had a desert environment so this time I decided to go with the opposite. Now Forgotten should have taught me that planning a map and drawing a layout is always a good idea, but unfortunately I'm an idiot and just started to put stuff together in the editor (just like in Forgotten...) and came up with something like this:

Behold the very first version of Frostbite (for you non-finns, the map's name in upper right means "xsnowstuff") The map was supposed to be a lump of snow and ice in middle of an ocean with icebergs in the skybox slowly passing by. Doesn't sound too exciting. I couldn't even decide if it would be territory or booty gamemode. Also having a large open space is not good for performace because everything would be visible no matter where the player is.

I realized the map had no future and decided to go with more Forgotten-like environment, except in snow:

Took couple building parts from the first version and started to build a castle and a mountain around them. The map was going to be booty mode, this being the path between pirates and knights. Next I started with knight's base:

Looks familiar? Cathedral was originally a part of Frostbite. Unfortunately at this point I felt that the map was going to be way too much like Forgotten. And if this cathedral was supposed to be knight's base, enemies with chests would have no chance to escape from archers.

I wanted to try something new and decided to turn the map to Holy Grail mode. This would give me more freedom because there wouldn't have to be balanced bases and routes for each team.

This was the first Holy Grail version of Frostbite. It was big. Way too big to be exact. Being a heavy knight in this version was far from fun. I wanted to fix it without having to redo lots of areas so first I cut out the cathedral and turned it into separate map. Then removed the area on the bottom of the image and replaced it with the broken corridor part from the top.

After having redone the lightning way too many times it was finally ready for release.

...

And now after having redone the lightning couple more times it should soon be ready for 2.3.

Almost all the other maps, including 2.2 Frostbite, had bright white daylight. For 2.3 I tried some warmer yellow light, changed the sky from day to sunrise and added some haze and snowflakes:

that was about time! i thought pvkii development was over and started to lose hope. but it seems like some news arrived at last. maybe not the kind of news that i wished for, but anyways. good writing nontheless!

hey jahur, i really like the new look of cathedral however frostbite doesnt improove. i know that changing lightning is a bitch, but instead of making it a warm yellowish sunrise in frostbite, i would rather like to see a dark creepy fullmoonnight. pvk lacks those kind of maps, everyone tries to immitate the island flair, which can simply not be reached without the right setting of the map and so it somehow ruins it. there are so many advantages of a darker map, which most mappers dont recognise like the fear of the grailholder that when turning around any corner a sword could suddenly appear sticking out of his stomache making him fall on the floor and while spitting out blood screaming a desperate "Damn You!". well there are many more advantages which i wont list now. if you think that it was already so much work changing the lightning then if you alow me to, i would change it renaming the map pvk_frostbite_fullmoon or something like that. so if you think its a good idea then yost send me a PM or something, if not then i wont do anything as it is your map.

Problem with night maps is that in multiplayer players can easily gain advantage over other players by turning up their brightness, and that kinda defeats the point of having a night map in the first place.

Problem with night maps is that in multiplayer players can easily gain advantage over other players by turning up their brightness, and that kinda defeats the point of having a night map in the first place.

that's a good point, but that would also go for darker areas in daylight maps. custom adjustments is still a part of the game i think, and shouldn't be that big of a deal. i would love to see a night map in pvkii someday!

Alphas in normal maps is to make efficient use of texture registers of your video card. You can only have so many textures loaded at one time and so efficiently using all channels of each texture will give you more potential for more advanced effects.

HDR Skyboxes are not necessary, but they give a more accurate representation of the HDR in the sky. When exposure level is dropped the darker parts in the sky really shouldn't drop as much as the edges around the bright sun

surely 1 24-bit targa and one 8-bit targa is about the same as one 32 bit targa in memory? (im probly wrong because you have to make those vmts..)

also concerning hdr skyboxes, the way you make them totally threw me off i knew what they did but the way to make them confused me, i didnt realise i had to like make the PFM file then drag that onto splitskybox.exe to split them then make notepad files for each one, still feels excessive but still not as bad as what i had before. this isnt a support forum so im gonna stop posting about this stuff.

Not in video memory, the texture registers which are used when you are processing the textures in the shader. Depending on the shader model there are only so many registers and that dictates how many textures a single model/brush material can operate on at one time UNLESS you have a multipass shader, but that is more expensive. Since each texture is capable of using an alpha map it is very good practice to use those alpha maps to give more possibility for effects.